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Not since she’d reluctantly allowed me to be her knight in shining armor during a murder the club had been investigating. In that time, we’d spent seventy-two hours together.

I hadn’t learned a single thing about the woman in that time. She’d been so closed up that it was comical.

In the time that I’d spent with her, I’d learned only a few things.

She ate like a horse—whatever was put in front of her, she ate. She only drank water or coffee. And she could sleep literally anywhere.

I looked over my shoulder to find Charleigh standing behind me, looking murderous.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to force myself not to inhale deeply, but it was no use.

The smell of her was intoxicating.

The smell of her hair shampoo—jasmine and brown sugar—and clean soap—Dial—had been a nightly memory I replayed the moment I stepped into the shower.

Hell, I’d gone as far as smelling fucking shampoos at the store until I’d realized that whatever she’d used wasn’t there. I’d then gone to walking into those high-end stores like Ulta to see if I could find her shampoo there.

But funny enough, it’d been when I went to The Dollar Store for a can of beans for a soup I was making that I’d walked in and smelled it. A worker had recently dropped a box of shampoo that she was stocking on the shelves, and the smell had permeated the entire store.

I’d found myself wandering directly to the smell, finding the man cleaning up the cheapest bottles of shampoo the store stocked.

Of course, it’d been the cheapest brand.

Everything she did was cheap.

In the near year that I’d been stalking her, I’d noticed that she didn’t spend money on herself.

She didn’t go out to eat. She didn’t buy anything unnecessary. She didn’t stop and get coffee from the coffee shop in town. She didn’t get her nails done, or her hair done.

Which bothered me immensely.

I hadn’t met a woman in my entire life who didn’t splurge at least a little bit.

But Charleigh Kensington? The woman was the exact opposite of my late wife.

Lauri would’ve been all over the coffee shop in town, buying an expensive ten-dollar drink without giving it a single thought.

She’d be at the nail salon once a week, touching up nails that saw no work whatsoever. She’d be at the grocery store, buying all the expensive cheeses that The Mercantile had to offer.

Literally, if I could pick a woman that was Lauri’s exact opposite, it would be Charleigh.

And I wasn’t sure how to feel about her at all.

I’d loved my wife.

I’d adored the ground she walked on.

I hadn’t had a problem coughing up two hundred dollars for her hair once a month, or a hundred dollars for her nails once a week. Hadn’t blinked an eye if she came into the house with a new purse that’d cost me a grand.

I’d just loved her, and there was nothing about Lauri that had bothered me in any way. Not even her spending habits.

But as my eyes had followed Charleigh’s every move over these last months, I’d realized that something could be said for her frugalness. She didn’t waste time or money on stuff that didn’t matter. And that was just as perfect to me as Lauri.

But my obsession with Charleigh had fucked me up, because once upon a time, I’d promised Lauri forever. Then I’d killed her.

There was a certain level of fuckedupness in my head that wouldn’t let me see past my mistakes.

“Lay it out for me again.” Charleigh fell into a seat two down from my own.